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This is update #5 for the “No Stone Unturned” case study site, which means the site has been up and running now for about five months. Before I dive in, if you need to catch up on the strategy behind this case study, be sure to check out the playlist over on YouTube.
In last month’s update, I mentioned that we were seeing what appeared to be the very beginning of an upward trend in traffic coming from Google Search. As you’ll see further below, that turned out to be true.
I’ll jump into the traffic in a minute, but first, let’s take a quick look at how the site’s coming along.
Posts
In March, we published another 50 posts, bringing the total to 243:
Topic Clusters
We also finished topic clusters #5 and #6 and started #7:
Internal Linking
A big part of the strategy for this site is to add a ton of internal links. However, we’re not doing this with a specific structure, meaning we don’t have target and support pages like you might see with some strategies.
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Instead, we’re simply adding internal links wherever it makes sense to link from one post to another. Naturally, this leads to a ton of internal links within each cluster, as well as a handful between the clusters.
Out of curiosity, I quickly tallied up the total number of links on the site (only the ones within the content itself), which came to a whopping 1,855. Averaging that out over the number of posts published comes out to an average of about 7.5 internal links per post.
In reality, very few posts have around 7.5 internal links. Instead, we have some posts that have 20+ links pointing to them, others with only 1-2, with the remaining posts falling somewhere in between.
Although we don’t have any specific target and support pages, the topics that are larger and more relevant to each cluster as a whole naturally tend to have more links pointing to them.
Traffic
As I mentioned earlier, the upward curve we saw right at the tail-end of February was indeed the beginning of a nice upward trajectory.
Here’s a comparison of what the Google Search clicks and impressions looked like at the end of February compared to where they ended up by the end of March (ignore the totals in the first screenshot, as it’s literally the same screenshot as the second, but with part of the graph hidden):
For those of you (like me) who prefer to look at Google Analytics, here’s what the month-to-month growth in pageviews looks like so far:
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Final Thoughts
Seeing this kind of growth this early on a site is definitely encouraging. In fact, this is the fastest growth we’ve seen on any of our sites to date.
We’re now approaching the 6-12 month window where we would hope to see the most significant growth, so it’ll be interesting to see whether the traffic continues to build on this initial momentum or starts to flatten out.
Keep an eye out for the next update in about a month.
